Where Are All of Earth’s Impact Craters?

When you look up at the Moon through a telescope or pair of binoculars you see a world covered in craters of all sizes. It only stands to reason that Earth must also have craters like the Moon, if not many more because of its much larger size. So where are they all?

As it turns out there are many impact craters on Earth visible today, even though millions of years of erosion by weather and tectonic activity have virtually erased all but the largest and deepest. Former astronomer and planetarium director Thomas Wm. Hamilton has compiled the names, locations, and brief data on each known crater around the world – as well as a few on other worlds – and lists them in his latest book Impact Craters of Earth.

8.5″ x 11″ in size and 60 pages long, Impact Craters of Earth is a workbook-sized softcover publication. It’s divided into sections by continent and selected planets and moons, and provides a short description on each crater including name, location, size, estimated age, and global coordinates. A few color images are included.

After a page and a half of introduction Hamilton gets right into the crater list. This isn’t a book all about geology or the process of crater formation or NEOs and asteroids – this is a handy (and handheld) compendium of craters and to that end Hamilton has done his work well. You might even be surprised that there’s an impact scar from space around where you live!

I received a free copy of this book to review, and I’m putting it proudly into my space library!

Thomas Wm. Hamilton is a retired astronomer who worked for three years on the Apollo Project. He taught astronomy for 32 years and worked in several planetariums. This is his fifth book on an astronomical topic since his retirement.See more books by Hamilton here.